At the Turn of the Screw
by thecircularsky
Summary: A flashback of Severus Snape's final regrets, laced with excerpts from "On Respect." Compatible with Canon.


Disclaimer: The author does not, in any way, profit from the following story. All creative rights for the world and characters herein belong to J.K. Rowling. Bold italic passages are direct quotations, with occasional minor adjustments, from "On Self-Respect" by Joan Didion. The quotations are ordered in the same sequence as they appear in the original essay.

Author's Note: Thank you for reading. Please review!

_**Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.**_

A spatter of ink splat across the floor, No one noticed. In a room filled with black robes hunched over examinations, none of the _scribble scribbles_ stopped as Snape realized he made the wrong choice.

_**Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.**_

The next few meetings, he felt commensurately false. His friends detected nothing; nothing had changed except a secret knowledge that his inclusion, and his acceptance of his inclusion, was _all wrong_. But habits wore on. All still laughed at fifth-year gossip and whispered promises of greatness to one another, at home inside the heavy curtains surrounding Dolohov's bed.

As the staircases moved on a walk with Avery, Snape felt something. The people he faced, even the flickers of face-like-things, triggered impulse to yell excuses and run, to explain unfixable problems with himself that no one had asked about. Scratching himself in his robes felt dirty and nasty, twitches in his sleep, the oiliness of his skin, seeped with personal vileness. As months dragged on, Snape began to rot. Even the walls began to hate him.

_**The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.**_

Now! Now the Dark Lord favored him, Snape walked with the security of a man protected. The Death Eaters sidestepped on their missions to give him room to charge. Power shone to the world in bridges dismantled and people swept to sea, in bonfires where they oughtn't be, and in levitating women flown elsewhere and used without consent. Sometimes he and his friends apparated to a rainy shore where in a cave celebrations ensued, but in lost moments, Snape gazed longfully at the crashing waves. Finally acknowledged by others, he could no longer acknowledge himself.

_**One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones' marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.**_

Despite the destruction, Snape imagined his path headed into an acceptable world. Wrong could lead to right, it was possible. No previous circumstances circumvented the feelings of inadequacy that he imagined came from being human. His antagonists sometimes felt so far away as to be rain in the wind. Potter, Black, and Pettigrew had become a cold ire long ago – during his pain he began to float away from physical presence. Anger grew dull as Snape discarded unchangeable things. It was as though, in better times, he felt like two people: the one floating indifferent to the reality, and one writhed on the ground choking with soap.

_**However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. **_

Lily's murder forced a coalescence of the two people inside of him. He could no longer detach himself from the hate into which he had dropped. The hate, the empathy, the truth of his own actions, the illusions he had force-fed himself -

_**Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.**_

He was consumed with every bad feeling he had ever known. His insides churned in hot sand, eyes burst with pressure. His forehead pounded with the migraine of constant despair. Life stopped being poetic.

Approaching Dumbledore was the most falsely courageous act he would ever commit. No act can be courageous when one loses consciousness, through conscience, when awake.

_**T**__**o have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.**_

When he dropped the quill in fifth year, he signed away his ability to love, yet could still feign love to an old man looking for it. But he could no more be indifferent to his past pains and present insecurities than he could be indifferent to his obligation to stay awake in times of waking sleep.

_**If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses.**_

He hated children no less than he hated himself. Teaching was only a habit.

_**On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us.**_

Severus had created a person so believable that even he could not break from the clay. What person he could scarcely remember, who dreamed of doing good for no sake at all, rather than the sake of an image without which he wouldn't exist. Having been seen as a bat, he had turned into a bat. A war raged on in which he was a moving spectator, every act determined by his hollowness inside, doing the right things out of fear of answering to himself should he stand up to his past actions and present fate.

_**We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.**_

As his back pressed against the wall and Nagini flew at his fear-choked face, Snape realized he was a hero for all the wrong reasons. His images slowed down to still-frames, and he had, for the first time in years, freedom to think of the person he was without preparing for future behavior. He realized, in clarity as great as the dropping of a quill in fifth-year exams, that the person he had always felt he was, had gone and would never, in the whole future of all experiences felt by anyone, return.

_**Without self-respect, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.**_


End file.
